Matt Damon suggests cancelation is a punishment that never truly ends.
The 55-year-old star discussed the topic during his recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience alongside his The Rip co-star, Ben Affleck.
Near the one hour and 18-minute mark in the video linked here, Rogan discussed Hollywood and public backlash, characterizing being canceled as "this idea that one thing you said or one thing you did, and now we're going to exaggerate that to the fullest extent and cast you out of civilization for life."
"In perpetuity," Damon responded. “I bet some of those people would have preferred to go to jail for 18 months or whatever, and then come out and say, ‘Nope ... I paid my debt. Like, we’re done. Like, can we be done?’ The thing about that getting kind of excoriated publicly like that is it just never ends. It just will follow you to the grave.”
Rogan added, “It's also this problem that people have with people that are in the public eye, and they have this, like, desire to chop them down always. And anybody that stumbles in the public eye, they want to destroy their life, and they want to just pile on, and you're not there with them. You don't feel the empathy. You're not talking to them, they're not a human being. It's just text on a screen.”
Affleck, 53, weighed in, comparing it to a “sixth grade instinct” of seeing children pointing out when others are “in trouble.”
“We have dark, fucked up instincts too sometimes to isolate people or get joy out of someone else's they're in trouble, maybe because part of it's saying, ‘Hey, it's not me,’ you know?” he said. “So if you can point the finger, everyone's looking over there, we feel safer. To take any forgiveness out of it is a really fucked up thing, because then it makes it impossible to actually go, ‘Alright, yeah, I did that fuckshit, that was wrong. I get it.’ Because it doesn't matter. Once you've said you've done it, you become like an outcast and I don't think anybody wants to think you're the sum total of who you are is your worst moment.”
Affleck added that he believes people want to be judged for the capability of “doing something good,” but isn’t making excuses for people who frequently do “horrible shit [and] don’t care.”
“No one's trying to absolve that, but you remove the ability to sort of forgive people or look at them in a complicated way,” he explained. “It's like … the instinct to get a team tribal oriented, and it just becomes a sport.’”
Damon faced backlash in 2021 after an interview with The Sunday Times in which he said he had stopped using the F-slur only "months ago" following a "treatise" from his daughter about "how that word is dangerous."
The Good Will Hunting actor later clarified his remarks in a statement to Variety, saying he never used the word in his "personal life," does not "use slurs of any kind," and that understood why the interview "led many to assume the worst."
“I have never called anyone ‘f****t’ in my personal life and this conversation with my daughter was not a personal awakening. I do not use slurs of any kind,” he wrote at the time. “I have learned that eradicating prejudice requires active movement toward justice rather than finding passive comfort in imagining myself ‘one of the good guys’. And given that open hostility against the LGBTQ+ community is still not uncommon, I understand why my statement led many to assume the worst. To be as clear as I can be, I stand with the LGBTQ+ community.”